ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus Motherboard Review :: BIOS And Overclocking

The P5N32-E SLI Plus board uses the Phoenix Award 8mb BIOS that is popular among motherboard manufacturers. ASUS uses their own proprietary functions to control the overclocking and the features of the board. The BIOS is broken up into Main, Extreme Tweaker, Advanced, Power, Boot, Tools menus.

BIOS

Battery

The Main Menu has the System Time, the System Date, the Language, type of Legacy Diskette, Primary IDE Master, Primary IDE Slave, the SATA drives detected, whether HDD SMART Monitoring is enabled and the Installed and Usable memory sizes.

The Extreme Tweaker menu allows you to overclock your board. You can set the Overclock to, Standard, Ai Overclocking mode, Ai NOS, or Manual setting. The Standard setting will set the FSB of the CPU to the regular setting. Ai NOS allows you to overclock the CPU by either 0%, 3%, 5%, 8% or 10% when the system load calls for it. AI Overclocking forces the system to the predetermined overclock. The other submenus on Extreme Tweaking include Overclocking, Over Voltage, SLI Broadcast Aperature enable/disable, NVIDIA GPU Ex, LinkBoost and SLI Ready Memory.

System Clocks will set the overclock of the PCI Express bus for each of the three PCI Express x16 slots independently. You can key in a DEC number from 100-200, which will change the PCI Express frequency to that speed if the system can handle it. The SPP to MCP Reference Clock can be set from 200-500MHz in 1MHz increments.

The FSB can be set to run Linked or Unlinked. In Linked Mode the CPU FSB is linked to the memory speed. In Unlinked mode, the CPU FSB is separately clocked from the memory speed. FSB can be set from 533-3000 (remember to divide this by 4 for Quad Data Rate.) If you want to run in Linked mode the FSB- Memory Ratio can change the memory ratio from Auto,1:1, 5:4, 3:2 or Sync mode. Memory frequency can be set from 400-2600 (remember to divide this by 2 to get actual speed.)

Voltage settings can be set from the Over Voltage submenu. CPU voltage can be set to 1.90V. Memory voltage can be set to up to 3.425V maximum. The HyperTransport Voltage can be set to 1.95V maximum. The Southbridge voltage maximum is 1.85V, The CPU VTT voltage can be set to 1.55V m `aximum. The NB Core Voltage can be set to a maximum of 2.75V. The DDRII Controller Reference Voltage can be set to +30mV.

Overclocking of the regular 3.8GHz Pentium 670 CPU was extremely painless. Using ASUS's AI Overclocking I was able to successfully overclock the CPU to 4.18GHz, a 10% increase. The FSB was able to overclock to a maximum of 370MHz using a Core 2 Duo CPU that was unlocked (engineering sample.) This FSB of 1480MHz is pretty darn good.